Does FriendFeed really make Facebook a Twitter killer?

The big social media news this week comes, as it so often does these days, from Facebook. Around a garden table in Mark Zuckerberg’s back yard, Facebook agreed the acquisition of FriendFeed.

Mashable has covered the purchase in depth, and argues that Facebook has acquired a talented team, achieved a better fit than the far more expensive failed buyout of Twitter and, crucially, taken control of a product which points Facebook firmly in the right direction. In other words, it’s gunning for Twitter.

The move has apparently been in the pipeline since 2007, not long after FriendFeed first saw the light of day, though with Twitter exploding into the mainstream it’s clear that Facebook’s motivation will have shifted since then. That’s if you even believe that Twitter is the targeted rival. I’ve seen more than one commentator suggest that giving Google a bloody nose is the primary goal.

It’s more likely to be a little from column A and a little from column B, but I’d say Twitter is a more appropriate rival. In fact, Facebook has been hunting down Twitter for months now. The current look of the site has been brought in through several iterations, each one positioning Facebook a little closer to being able to compete with Twitter for a share of the status update market.

Its realtime news feed reflects FriendFeed’s homepage and is aimed at rivalling the constantly-updating third-party Twitter clients which are proving so popular. And having started to make much of its content visible in public, Facebook has targeted Twitter Search by launching its own realtime search functionality.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable explains in a nutshell why the merger is a threat to Twitter in realtime search:

“Of the many things FriendFeed has done well, search is at the forefront. Their real-time search engine is much stronger than Twitter’s in terms of interface and usability: it simply doesn’t have nearly the volume of content to be as valuable as Twitter search. However, that problem is immediately solved if you plug content from Facebook’s 250+ million members into it. Combine that with FriendFeed’s team history – they previously built Gmail and Google Maps so they obviously know how to scale things to Facebook size – and you have what sets up to be a serious threat to Twitter.”

It’ll do better search than Twitter, be more robust and more reliable than Twitter, and sits on the seemingly infallible Facebook. So, it sounds for all the world like FaceFeed is going to kill Twitter.

Except it’s not (necessarily).

While early adopters have been using FriendFeed for a while and seem to love it (personally I haven’t cracked it yet, but that’s just me) – and the assumed FaceFeed product sounds like an excellent and useful one – it just doesn’t add up for me. Not yet, anyway.

In my view, Twitter is mainstream now. But let’s not kid ourselves that social media is doing all the hard work on its own. Facebook has been a roaring success, but Twitter’s mainstream appeal was something of a fluke of fortune. It’s a brilliant tool and deserves its success, but it got lucky that the right people think so.

Our (I say “our” loosely, because this most certainly does not apply to me) obsession with celebrities helped Twitter to crack the US and UK markets. In the US, Ashton Kutcher’s nauseating race to a million followers with CNN went some way to tipping Twitter. I’m proud to say that the catalyst in the UK was Stephen Fry, a genuine early adopter and “tech person” who sent Twitter’s traffic through the roof with a conversation on primetime television with Jonathan Ross, though Phillip Schofield actually beat them to the punch that week.

How many people started using Twitter to follow their favourite celebrities? Probably more than I could bear to think about. But the simplicity and immediacy makes it difficult to challenge, and the celebrities are already on Twitter so why would they change for something which will either be more complicated or exactly the same?

That possibility out of the window, it’s difficult to see how FaceFeed could become the huge success Twitter has. Without mainstream appeal, it could well remain the territory of social media addicts and early adopters. Yes, Facebook’s backing will boost its userbase and give it plenty of credibility. But it will either be different from Twitter (i.e. more complex and less intuitive) or a direct challenger which will suffer because it needs the social media thought-leaders and celebrities to abandon thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers.

Will Facebook and FriendFeed be a success? Almost certainly. They’re both superb at what they do and have a huge userbase to exploit, perhaps with Facebook Lite. But this just doesn’t strike me as the tool that kills of Twitter. The power users will just use both or stick with what they know.